4 Surprising Ways Huge Disasters Ruined People's Lives

Lilian Lepere had the first part of that strategy down. In 2015, Lepere was working as a graphics designer for a printworks in Dammartin-en-Goele, Paris, when two armed gunmen stormed the building and took the manager hostage. Lilian managed to escape and hid in a kitchen cupboard, unaware that two days prior, those same gunmen had attacked the Charlie Hebdo office, where they killed 12 people. As the subjects of a full-scale manhunt, Cherif and Said Kouachi had chosen the printworks as the site of their final showdown.

While his manager patched up the brothers' wounds and offered them pre-shootout hot drinks, Lepere texted his father: "I am hidden on the first floor. I think they have killed everyone. Tell the police to intervene."

When they did, Lepere relayed the positions of the gunmen, what he'd witnessed of their weapons (including a goddamn rocket launcher), and any snippets of conversation he overheard from his perch between the Drano and that old detergent that just didn't work out. It all went swimmingly ... until the police accidentally revealed to the press that they had a literal inside man. As soon as they saw that, the terrorists began a search of the property, and according to Lepere, they were seconds away from discovering his location before they did the world a favor and took the ol' bullet train to hell.

Only hours after the Brothers Kouachi stormed the printworks, co-terrorist Amedy Coulibaly launched an attack on a kosher supermarket, killed four people, took the rest as hostages, and demanded the safe release of the brothers. Amidst the carnage, some citizens were able to escape to an underground storage room. Reasonably sure that this whole terrorist siege thing wasn't going to end well, they texted their friends and loved ones to say goodbye ... which one station, BFMTV, learned of and promptly broadcast without a care in the world: "There's a person, a woman, who might have been hiding from the start in the fridge. And who is probably still there."

Luckily, Coulibaly didn't have access to a television at the time, and those folks remained undetected until commandos breached the supermarket and bought him an economy ticket right behind the Kouachis.

So you can see why, after being rescued by police, Lilian got up and went right after the media for voluntarily cosplaying as shithead reporter Richard Thornburg in this whole terrible Die Hard LARP.

By 1936, he'd crossed Asia, from India to Burma and beyond. In 1939, when Speck landed on Thursday Island, an island (duh) on the tip of Australia's Northern Territory, he was met by two constables who presented him with a congratulatory pair of handcuffs. They charged him as an enemy combatant sent to disrupt the war effort. Now, Speck had clearly departed Germany before the war had begun, but those savvy cops knew wily ol' Hitler loved to play the long game, and this one confused guy in a canoe was certainly the linchpin for the greatest war the world had ever seen.

Speck spent the next several years rotating through the country's various internment camps. Only after the war was he finally released and told to go home. As that had since been bombed to hell, however, he cut his losses and stayed in Australia. He set up an opal-dealing business and lived a decent life, but you can still use him as a cautionary example to get out of the family canoe trip. We won't tell anybody.

So yes, the fact that you've never heard of him before now is indeed an ominous portent ...

After JFK took his ill-fated ride through Dealey Plaza, Vaughn dropped his impersonations out of respect and tried to move back into mainstream comedy. America wouldn't have any of it, however. He was "funny JFK guy" and only "funny JFK guy," and no, he couldn't be "funny JFK guy" anymore.

Vaughn never recovered his following. Before he died in 2004, he sold his life rights in the hope that someone would one day turn his tale into a movie, but nothing ever came of it. Actually, maybe Nothing Ever Came Of It is a good title for that movie. Or at least an exceedingly grim epitaph.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you can subscribe to. It's really good, honest.

Vaughn probably could've gone back to JFK impersonations later in life -- after all, people make flippin' JFK bobbleheads now.

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